We Will Never Sell Your Data. Here's Why That's a Business Decision, Not Just a Promise.

What's actually happening

In June 2025, a Capitol Forum investigation revealed that this app — one of the most popular family tracking tools in the world — had been selling more than 4,600 audience segments through a data marketplace. Not anonymous traffic patterns. Not aggregate foot-traffic counts. Audience segments like "Bar Frequent Visitor," "Victoria's Secret Frequent Visitor," "Children Aged 6-10," and "Household Income Under $15K."

These segments are tied to pseudonymous identifiers that link back to real people across devices and platforms. Privacy experts were blunt: this is personal data, regardless of what any privacy policy calls it.

The company claims the data is "aggregated." But when that data is attached to an identifier designed to follow an individual across websites, apps, and ad networks — the word "aggregated" stops meaning what most people think it means.

One privacy expert from the Electronic Privacy Information Center put it plainly: companies that provide a blanket description of their sharing practices and package it as a "privacy disclosure" are not actually being transparent. And only about 5% of this app's users had opted out of data sharing — not because they were comfortable with it, but because the opt-out was buried deep enough that most people never found it.

It gets worse

That same app owns a Bluetooth tracker company. In September 2025, Georgia Tech researchers found that these trackers broadcast unencrypted Bluetooth signals with static MAC addresses and semi-randomized IDs that get reused over time — making it trivially easy for someone to track another person's device. The researchers described the security as fundamentally broken.

Meanwhile, the Texas Attorney General sued the app's insurance data partner in January 2025, alleging they'd collected trillions of miles of driving data from over 45 million Americans through software secretly embedded in popular apps. That data was used to build what they marketed as the "world's largest driving behavior database" — and insurers used it to justify raising premiums.

When a family safety app is simultaneously selling your location habits to advertisers, enabling Bluetooth tracking with broken encryption, and feeding your driving data to insurance companies through hidden software — the word "safety" starts to ring hollow.

Why this matters for anyone planning group travel

If you're a parent sending your kid on a school trip, or a chaperone responsible for a group of young travelers, or friends coordinating logistics across a foreign city — you need tools that work. You need to know where people are, coordinate meetups, share photos, split expenses.

But the apps available to you right now were largely built on a business model where you are the product. Your location data, your movement patterns, your daily habits — these are revenue streams, not features.

The regulatory landscape is catching up. Oregon now bans the sale of precise geolocation data entirely, effective January 2026. Maryland's data privacy act took effect in October 2025. California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont are considering similar measures. Twenty states now have comprehensive privacy laws on the books, and the trend is unmistakable: the era of treating location data as a commodity is ending.

How we built Roamii differently

We built Roamii because we've been on those trips. We've been the chaperone trying to coordinate 40 travelers across a European city using a group chat that moves too fast to follow, a spreadsheet that nobody updates, and a tracking app that makes 20-year-olds feel like they're wearing ankle monitors.

So when we sat down to design Roamii, the first decision we made wasn't about features. It was about the business model.

Roamii makes money from subscriptions and organizational contracts. That's it. We charge the people who use our product, and in return, we build something that actually serves them — not advertisers, not data brokers, not insurance companies.

This means we never need to sell your data because we don't need to. Our revenue comes from building a tool good enough that people and organizations are willing to pay for it. When your business model doesn't depend on data monetization, every feature you build can serve the people actually using the app.

Let's be honest about something: Roamii does use background location tracking. We have to. When a chaperone is responsible for people in a foreign city, a live map showing where everyone is isn't optional — it's the whole point. Organizations may require it. Alerts can be triggered if a traveler leaves a designated area. These are real safety tools for real situations.

For friend groups, it's entirely by choice. Share your location or don't. There are no consequences either way — Roamii doesn't make those decisions or facilitate any kind of punishment. That's between you and whoever you're traveling with.

The difference between Roamii and the apps making headlines isn't whether location data gets collected. It's what happens to it. Their location data flows into advertising platforms, audience segments, and data marketplaces. Ours stays within the trip — visible to the people who are supposed to see it, for the duration they need to see it, and that's where the pipeline ends.

Our check-in feature captures this philosophy. It's a "capture the moment" prompt — take a photo, confirm you're good, move on with your night. The chaperone gets peace of mind. The traveler gets a memory. The data doesn't end up in a segment called "Bar Frequent Visitor."

What we actually do with data

Your location data stays on your device and our secure servers for the duration of your trip. When the trip ends, we strip all user identifiers and keep only anonymous, aggregate coordinate data — no user IDs, no device identifiers, no persistent tokens that could reconnect a location to a person.

We don't send data to marketplaces. We don't attach it to identifiers designed to follow you across the internet. We don't build audience segments. We don't have an ad platform. We don't have a "monetization" team figuring out new ways to extract value from your movements.

The difference isn't just philosophical. It's architectural. The apps making headlines right now built their data pipelines to be linkable — persistent identifiers, cross-device matching, audience segmentation. Our system is built to be unlinkable. Once your trip is over, there's no technical path from an anonymous coordinate back to you.

This isn't virtue signaling. It's strategy.

When policymakers and the public learn that companies have piles of data on their 24/7 phone locations, the universal reaction is that it's creepy. We agree. And we think building a travel coordination app on top of "creepy" is a bad long-term bet.

The regulatory direction is clear. State laws banning geolocation data sales are multiplying. The FTC is actively enforcing against companies that share location data without informed consent. Every year, the legal definition of "personal data" expands, and the companies that built their revenue models on the gray area between "aggregated" and "identifiable" are finding that gray area shrinking fast.

We'd rather build something we're proud of on a foundation that's getting stronger — not scramble to restructure a data pipeline every time a new state passes a privacy law.

What to look for in any app that touches your location

Whether you use Roamii or not, here are the questions worth asking about any app that accesses your location:

Where does your location data go after the app uses it? There's a difference between an app that tracks your location to show your chaperone where you are and an app that tracks your location to show your chaperone where you are and also sells your movement patterns to advertisers. The tracking itself isn't the problem. The pipeline behind it is.

How does the company make money? If the app is free and the company is publicly traded, the math has to work somehow. Look at their revenue breakdown. If "data licensing" or "advertising" appears alongside a location-tracking feature, your movement data is likely part of the equation.

What happens to your data after you stop using the app? Deletion policies matter. If a company retains your location history indefinitely, it remains a target for data brokers, hackers, and legal discovery — even years after you've moved on.

Can you actually find the opt-out? If opting out of data sharing requires navigating five menus deep into settings, the company isn't optimizing for your privacy. They're optimizing for low opt-out rates.

Roamii is a group travel coordination app built for real trips — school groups, friend getaways, and everything in between. We make money by building a product worth paying for. That's the whole model.

Learn more at roamii.app